Clarke, Donald C. --- "The Past and Future of Comparative Corporate Governance" [2012] ELECD 476; in Hill, A. Claire; McDonnell, H. Brett (eds), "Research Handbook on the Economics of Corporate Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2012)

Book Title: Research Handbook on the Economics of Corporate Law

Editor(s): Hill, A. Claire; McDonnell, H. Brett

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781848449589

Section: Chapter 21

Section Title: The Past and Future of Comparative Corporate Governance

Author(s): Clarke, Donald C.

Number of pages: 20

Extract:

21. The past and future of comparative corporate
governance
Donald C. Clarke*



1. INTRODUCTION

Recent years have seen the rise of comparative corporate governance (CCG) as an increas-
ingly mainstream approach within the world of corporate governance studies. In part, this
stems from a recognition by legal scholars that globalization calls for an increased under-
standing of how things are done in the rest of the world. And in part, it is a function of an
increasingly empirical turn in corporate law scholarship generally. Different practices in other
jurisdictions present at least the possibility of natural experiments that attempt to find causal
relationships between particular features of a corporate governance regime and real-world
outcomes.
What specifically is unique about CCG as an approach to corporate governance studies?
What have we learned, and where should we go? These questions are particularly urgent as
we enter the second decade of the twenty-first century. The financial crisis has called into
question (if it has not yet, perhaps, definitively overturned) many of our traditional ways of
thinking about corporate governance and the relationship between business enterprises and
the state (Westbrook 2009; Verret 2010; Posner 2009). Are there other countries that do it
better?
But there is another economic trend that makes comparative corporate governance
research more urgent than ever: the rise of what we might call `non-traditional' jurisdictions.
As this chapter will show, CCG research has dealt extensively and skillfully with Anglo-
American jurisdictions, Europe, and Japan. But the last 30 ...